The Need for Organisational Resilience - Chapter 1

To address the challenges of uncertainty and complexity, organisational resilience is

often referred to as an ability to bounce back from adversity (Burnard and Bhamra 2011).

Originally, the resilience literature emerged from studies of ecological systems, noted for

having a persistent absorptive capacity to deal with disturbances, followed by a

reconfiguration of the system (Holling 1973; Gunderson 2000; Warner 2011).

From a socio-ecological perspective, resilience is associated with the ability of a system

to retain function when perturbed (Carpenter et al. 2001). The concept of disaster

management (Paton, Smith, and Violanti 2000), for example, focusses primarily on

recovering from a crisis, largely ignoring the pre-crisis incubation phase (Turner 1976).

Another strand is one of Organisational Resilience (Home and Orr 1997; Hamel and

Välikangas 2003; Pagonis 2003) – not dissimilar to the body of literature on resilience

engineering (Hollnagel 2006; Woods 2006) – which sees resilience as a fundamental

property of an organisation to adapt to the requirements of the environment’s variability.

From a socio-psychological view, a further body of literature has emerged which considers

Resilience as an outcome, based on an attentional state of mindfulness (Weick and Sutcliffe

2006; Weick and Sutcliffe 2015). Mindfulness is:

the combination of on-going scrutiny of existing expectations, continuous refinement

and differentiation of expectations based on newer experiences, willingness and

capability to invent new expectations that make sense of the unprecedented events,

a more nuanced appreciation of context and ways to deal with it, and identification of

new dimensions of context that improve foresight and current functioning.” (Weick

and Sutcliffe 2001, 32)

What these bodies of literature have in common are principal properties of resilient

organisation (see Figure 1.2). Resilient organisations may choose to be defensive, to protect

their organisation from anything bad happening. They may be progressive in an

opportunistic manner; pursuing consistency in goals, processes and routines as well as

being flexible in their ideas, views and actions.

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